Caterpillar Inc. of Peoria, Ill., manufactures off-road mining mobile machines. For example, the Caterpillar 777C is an off-road mining truck. In commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,390,125, Kyrtsos et al disclose an autonomous mobile machine system for use with a mining mobile machine such as a 777C truck. Such an autonomous mobile machine system may be used, for example, to implement an autonomous mining operation. For example, a plurality of autonomous dump trucks can haul rock from an excavation site to a crusher site in an open pit mining operation.
In addition, in commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,586,030, Kemner et al disclose a system using a queuing technique to manage a single input, fixed position resource such as a wheel loader. However, in a mining system, there are several resources, such as hopper loaders, which may fail to load the mobile machine properly. In more general terms, the mobile machine may not successfully access the resource. For example, in a load resource having a hopper loader, if the load chute jams, or the hopper runs out of load material, then the mobile machine will not receive a full load. In cases such as this, where there was not a successful access of the resource, the mobile machine either waits at the load resource until the problem is corrected, or continues to its next destination with a partial load. Either alternative is an inefficient use of valuable resources. There needs to be a system or method in place which can instruct the mobile machine as to its next action based on a current condition of the mining site.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems as set forth above.